KernelTrap - Oops

Quote: We Wouldn't Need That Nice Oops-Printing Code

Jeremy — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:09:28 +0000

"Geeze you're picky! If everyone was like you we wouldn't need that nice oops-printing code."

Compiler Oops

Jeremy — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 01:50:41 +0000

"In the kerneloops.org stats, a new oops is rapidly climbing the charts, began Arjan van de Ven, referring to his website where he automatically collects kernel oops and warning reports from mailing lists, bugzillas, and a special client. Regarding the latest oops, he noted, "the oops is a page fault in the ext3 'do_slit' function, and the first report of it was with 2.6.26-rc6-git3." Linux creator Linus Torvalds took a quick interest in the issue, observing that all the oopses seemed to be on the i686 architecture, suggesting, "could this perhaps be an indication that it is specific to i686 some way (eg a compiler issue?)"

Shortly before Linus sent out his emails, Dave Airlie confirmed that this was indeed a known compiler bug affecting GCC 4.3.1. The bug report notes, "any ext* filesystem which enables the dir_index feature is likely susceptible". Linus caught up on his email and retorted, "gaah. I should read all my email instead of wasting my time trying to match up the code with what I can reproduce.." The reason the Red Hat bug report wasn't automatically picked up by the kerneloops website was because the oops was reported in a jpeg image, leading Arjan to quip, "maybe one day if I'm really bored I'll implement OCR into [kerneloops.org] ;)".

Tracking Kernel Oops

Jeremy — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 21:30:23 +0000

"The http://www.kerneloops.org website collects kernel oops and warning reports from various mailing lists and bugzillas as well as with a client users can install to auto-submit oopses," began Arjan van de Ven, referring to a website first announced last December. He summarized, "this week, a total of 3670 oopses and warnings have been reported, compared to 3029 reports in the previous week." The 'kerneloops' client is available from the project's web page, and is now being included by multiple distributions. Arjan explains, "in addition to Fedora, Debian now has included the client application in their default GUI install targets, thanks a lot for that!" He went on to discuss some recent changes:

"This week, based on feedback, I've split the report into 'untainted' and 'caused by proprietary drivers'. Let me know if I should continue doing this or if the old format was better.

"As an experiment (on request) I've exported the database to text files (one file per report) and stuck it in a git repository. You can take a look with git clone git://www.kerneloops.org/ Suggestions for improving the format of this are obviously very welcome, as are 'yes useful' and 'no not useful' comments. Again, this is an experiment, if it's not seen as useful I may discontinue it."

Quote: Don't Panic

Jeremy — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 13:21:52 +0000

"It's ascii art I took it from someone's signature 12 years ago, it's meant to be the guy on the cover of some of the editions of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Don't Panic! :-)"

Further Oops Insights

Jeremy — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 21:44:20 +0000

"[The] text below is mostly for the benefit of newbies - it's more along the lines of 'how to get from [a] bug report to the source of [the] bug', with more details than normal," began Al Viro, offering a full review of another Linux kernel oops in an effort to educate more people on how this is done. Al's walk through included a patch to fix the bug that caused the oops. He noted:

"This might be worth doing on [a] more or less regular basis, especially if more people join the fun; everyone [has] their own set of tricks in [this] area and making it easier to gather might help a lot of people. It's not just about oops-tracing per se, of course - Arjan's site gives a nice collection of those, so that makes an obvious starting point."